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Harmattan Season by Tochi Onyebuchi Is a Hardboiled Sensation
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Harmattan Season by Tochi Onyebuchi Is a Hardboiled Sensation
A wholly original mix of fantasy, alternate history, and hardboiled detective noir.
By Alex Brown
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Published on June 17, 2025
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Harmattan Season, the latest novel from the incredibly talented Tochi Onyebuchi, is hard to describe. It’s a little of this, a little of that, a little all over the place in the best way. It blends hardboiled detective noir with fantasy with alternate history, and the resulting mix is something wholly original. Each year there are a handful of books that truly deserve to be called a “must-read,” and this, without a doubt, is one of them.
Harmattan Season is set in our world, but it’s not an exact match. The French have colonized an unknown West African country, and the story begins a while after that in an unknown time but probably early 20th century. The trauma of a recent rebellion, brutally put down by the French, haunts the land. Boubacar, a “deux-fois” or biracial man who is both français (French) and dugulen (the Black people indigenous to the region), fought as part of the sorodassi, an imperial military force who suppressed the uprising. He fought alongside Moussa, a dugulen detective for the local policier (police) and the closest thing Bouba has to a friend. Despite promises of his sorodassi time opening economic and educational doors, Bouba is deeply in debt and scrounging work as a chercher (private investigator) for both the French and dugulen populations. As deux-fois, he can pass as white in the French Quarter, but when in the Ethnic Quarter everyone knows he’s Black. As the dry, dusty season known as Harmattan rolls over the city, the undercurrent of tension finally boils over.
Bouba is wasting his life away at home when a bleeding woman collapses on his doorstep. Dying from a strange wound at her side, she begs him to hide her. He does, just in time for Moussa to drag him out of his apartment in search of the woman. When Bouba returns, she’s gone, and the cops have no idea where she is. He should forget her. He should move on with his life. And he might have, if not for discovering her the next day floating above a street, her blood hovering around her. The dead mystery woman is a Floater, a dugulen with an uncanny ability to float through the air.
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Harmattan Season
Tochi Onyebuchi
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Harmattan Season
Tochi Onyebuchi
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Boubacar’s quest to uncover the identity of the woman and the cause of her death leads him into the lavish estates, grimy warehouses, filthy back alleys, and crowded teahouses of his city. Everyone—dugulen, diéman (white people), and deux-fois alike—is trapped in the web of colonialism. Some are trying to extricate themselves and their people from it, while others are tightening the noose, out of fear or greed. The city teeters on the edge, but what happens when it topples over the edge is anyone’s guess. More dead dugulen turn up, each missing an organ. More inexplicable bombs drag whole chunks of the city into the air and disfigure those caught inside the maelstrom. More calls for revolution and reform countered by greased palms and threats of violence. At the center of it all is preternaturally unlucky Bouba.
Hardboiled detective fiction from the mid-20th century is one of my favorite subgenres, but it’s a tricky one to get right. Much of it adheres close to its roots in pulp magazines in the 1920s and 1930s; think Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and more recently Walter Mosely’s Easy Rawlins. The world is gritty, volatile, and morally gray, the private dick is, well, kind of a dick, everyone betrays everyone else, and folks are going to die, probably several of them and in unpleasant ways. When thoughtfully crafted, the story holds a mirror up to the real world. Raymond Chandler is one of the best of the bunch and a personal favorite; he’s also the one who Harmattan Season is comped to, and if you’ve ever read any of his works, the comparison is obvious.
Not only does Onyebuchi use hardboiled detective tropes to explore deeper social themes (such as the consequences of colonialism) but he also plays with language in fascinating ways. Where some authors might mention a windy night, Chandler gifted readers with this bit of lushness: “There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.” Onyebuchi dives headfirst into Chandler-esque lurid description: “The moon’s a special kind of bright tonight. You wouldn’t know it’s Harmattan season. No trace of a dust haze. The dry in the air is the kind kind. Not the evil kind. Not the nosebleed kind. It’s good weather for the type of person who has trouble sleeping.”
Layered, evocative prose isn’t new to Onyebuchi, but he puts his craft to work in Harmattan Season. The thing about hardboiled detective fiction is that you have to make a line like “It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in” sound convincing coming out of the mouth of a guy hired to do a job no one else wants. Onyebuchi pulls it off spectacularly with Boubacar. His flair for elaborate narration and his ability to shift his writing style to perfectly match the genre and characters blended with the pulpy, crunchy prose of hardboiled detective fiction make for the perfect literary storm. Above and beyond the story, I reveled in his word choice, the structure of his sentences and paragraphs, the cliffhangers and interruptions, the myriad non-English words the reader has to decode through context clues sprinkled throughout.
From nuanced and unique characters to the vivid worldbuilding, from the complex themes and unforgiving plot, Tochi Onyebuchi’s Harmattan Season is already in the running for one of my favorite books of the year. Every book he writes blends genres, prose styles, and themes together in unexpected yet revelatory ways, and this is no exception. To put it simply, this book is sensational.[end-mark]
Harmattan Season is published by Tor Books.Read chapters 1-13
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